Filmmakers Georden West and Russell Sheaffer discuss their inspirations for Tribeca's Playland and its creation using Adobe Creative Cloud

Filmmakers Georden West and Russell Sheaffer discuss their inspirations for Tribeca's Playland and its creation using Adobe Creative Cloud

Kylee Pe a July 18, 2023

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Hero image source: Playland /Georden West, Russell Sheaffer

Enigmatic and subversive, Playland combines archival imagery, historical audio clips, and stylized vignettes to tell the story of what was Boston's longest surviving LGBTQIA+ venue and bring performers and partygoers from the 20th century out to play for one last night. To produce Playland , Director and Co-Editor Georden West and Producer and Co-Editor Russell Sheaffer relied on Adobe Creative Cloud apps including Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, Photoshop, and InDesign to push the creative process to the limit.

Described by Variety as a haunting and haunted collage of queer history,' the film leaps across decades, as the cast enact a journey starting in the 1940s, through the heydays of the 1960s and 70s, to decline and closure in the 1990s. Playland echoes the filmmakers' love for fashion, queer aesthetics, and the films of Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, and Barbara Hammer. In it, nothing stands still, and everything feels fragile and transient.

Before the film's Tribeca Festival debut, I spoke with them about the influences and experiences that shaped Playland , and the role Adobe tools played.

Can you tell us about your experience as a filmmaker and how you got started in the industry?

West: After dropping out of an MPA program, I applied to film school. I ended up at Emerson College. While I was there, a classmate introduced me to the work of Alexander McQueen. I was enraptured by the fashion and his collaborations with photographer Nick Knight. So, while I was still pursuing my MFA in Boston, I interned at Nick Knight's SHOWstudio in London which specializes in boundary-pushing fashion media. Nick and his team taught me as a filmmaker how it was better to get one sublime shot accomplished through meticulous on-set attention to detail rather than augmented by post-production magic.

At the time, SHOWstudio was focusing on projects around queer aesthetics. I was assigned to document Gareth Pugh's window project at Selfridges where he invited emerging fashion designers to make something in the storefront. Edwin Mohney (Costume Designer on Playland) was the artist there that day. Using red duct tape, they created a piece that nestled in the liminal space between a tableau vivant, sculpture, and garment.

After I returned from London, I shot my graduate short, Patron Saint , featuring the designs of Jamall Osterholm. It went on to premiere at Outfest and won gold at the Student Academy Awards. I knew I wanted my first feature film to be focused on queer history. In 2019, I started doing research at a local archive, The History Project, in Boston. This archive, one of the largest independent LGBTQIA+ archives in the nation, was around the corner from the gay bar where I was working as a server. What started out as a research project blossomed into a script speculating on the archival silence that defines so many queer historical records - erased, redacted, forgotten. In 2020, once I felt like it was ready to share, the first person I called was Edwin.

Sheaffer: I've always found myself situated somewhere between filmmaking and film theory and my journey as an artist and thinker is bound up in the space between the two. I started college in UC Irvine's Film & Media Studies program and got my first job in the industry right after graduation as an intern-turned-assistant editor on Jennifer Arnold's A Small Act . Jen was so generous and gracious with me. We worked together for years after A Small Act , first on Glee: The 3D Concert Movie (where I was a field producer) and then on ESPN's The Diplomat (where I was an associate producer). I undoubtedly owe my grasp of three act structure to her mentorship.

I then went to grad school, earning an MA from NYU's Cinema Studies department and a Ph.D. in Communication & Culture from Indiana University. My time in grad school was a revelation. The faculty at both institutions allowed me to fuse my interest in film scholarship with moving image making. I made some of my first films while at NYU, two of which ended up at galleries and events run by the MoMA (one of which was reviewed by Roberta Smith in the New York Times). While at IU, a short direct-animated film of mine premiered at Tribeca.

I'm now based in San Diego and find myself gravitating towards filmmakers who, like me, are exploring the intersections of embodiment, sexuality, and cinematic language. It's a real joy to get to imagine how and why a film is going to speak in a certain way with directors who are so open to reimagining how a scene, an act, or a film might move through time.

Image source: Playland /Georden West, Russell Sheaffer

How and where did you first learn to edit?

West: I started to edit because I wanted to make films. There was never a world for me in which the edit was not part of this. I have never not edited my own work.

I didn't have a camera, so I would shoot videos with my little brothers in our neighborhood on my cell phone or using the Photo Booth application on my laptop. Then I would spend weeks editing it in iMovie. Weeks.

In college, maybe this will age me (but I swear our tech was just out-of-date), I first shot on miniDVs. The small school I went to for undergrad had these little JVC cameras that recorded to tape. Then (after you transferred it to digital using a deck), we would edit in Premiere. We got a brief 101 session on the software and then were left to our own devices.

Sheaffer: I took a filmmaking class in high school decades ago. In that class, we had access to a handful of Canon miniDV cameras and iMacs with Final Cut Pro. E

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